Posted
by
Soulskillon Friday October 02, 2009 @05:18AM
from the making-small-bigger dept.

We've occasionally discussed Ben Heckendorn's various console modifications, and he's now come out with a new one: a laptop version of the PS3 Slim. It has volume control buttons for the built-in speakers, and plenty of vents for cooling. The display is a 17" widescreen panel, and the Slim's hardware doesn't fill that much space in the case, so there's a neat little compartment for the power cord. Ben's blog post shows details of the laptop's construction.

Yeah, it's bulky, and it lacks a keyboard, and seemingly a battery, so it's no wonder there's space to randomly throw the cable in. Still nice, but not really an improvement to throwing a PS3 in a bag and plugging it in at your destination.

Why? Most homes would have a larger screen available, with better placement for viewing than a laptop would provide. Most offices or other commercial places/organisations wouldn't let you plug in a console, pull out a controller and start gaming, even if the console did have a laptop format. Don't get me wrong, it's a neat project, but I'm just saying it's not very practical.

Why? Most homes would have a larger screen available, with better placement for viewing than a laptop would provide. Most offices or other commercial places/organisations wouldn't let you plug in a console, pull out a controller and start gaming, even if the console did have a laptop format. Don't get me wrong, it's a neat project, but I'm just saying it's not very practical.

Actually, most places will let you plug in. When traveling, I almost never ran my notebook off the battery. The airport, coffee shops or just about any other place where I could actually sit down and use my notebook would have a plug available for me to access. I see this as being no different.

And, sure, while nearly all homes will have a bigger screen, they may not have a better screen. Many homes still have old, non-hi-def CRT TV's plugged into their cable boxes, or have the cable plugged directly to the TV's.

Finally, I don't think practicality was the point. Sure, it's a nice feature, but this guy made this simply because he could. That was the whole point.

I think the correct term is "desktop replacement". It's a really nice job, but seriously? Sometimes things were not meant to be ported. What's the use of 1080p on a 17" screen? Somehow "stereo" just wasn't what the TruHD format had in mind...

Frederick Brown 'had allegedly built up a thriving business selling counterfeit games and installing mod chips, having advertised his services on Craigslist and other web sites. He allegedly sold pirated games from his Vista, CA residence as well, including both discs and hard drives preloaded with games that he would install into customers' Xboxes and Xbox 360s.

That's absolutely nothing like what is being done in the article. This guy is modding the hardware to make the ps3 portable, the guy in your link was putting mod chips in the 360's so people could play pirated games, which he also sold. Just because the word "mod" is used in both stories doesn't make them similar.

Which is modder in the sense of cracking the copy protection.Not modder as in taking the thing apart and putting it in a new case.

What earthly reason would Sony or anybody else have to object to someone voiding their warranty and making a one off device that can only reflect well on them? IF it breaks, not Sony's problem. If someone sees it, they are impressed by the workmanship. Still a Sony, still the guy's personal property.

Hardware companies have been known to sponsor case modders to make promotional pi

"Good money"? Good money is $100,000 a year net before tax. Call it 230 working days in a year, that's $434 clear profit each and every day. Just so we're clear, that's $434 in added value on top of the original hardware costs. Remember to account for shipping, tools and consumables, marketing, and warranty work - and if he doesn't offer any warranty, that eats into the perceived value.

Once the buzz dies down, do you reckon he can add $434 of value every day?

I don't know how long it would take to saturate the market, as it seems like sort of a small one; but given the prices that crazy fanboys will pay to have perfectly stock consoles a few days ahead of time, he might well be able to pull that by catering to a few well-heeled fanatics.

However, while the market might be there, I suspect that, once tapped, he couldn't hold out for long. 1 guy, using more or less standard home modding methods(albeit applied with competence substantially above average), doing b

However, while the market might be there, I suspect that, once tapped, he couldn't hold out for long. 1 guy, using more or less standard home modding methods(albeit applied with competence substantially above average), doing bespoke pieces would have a hard time competing with a smallish pro outfit doing larger runs at somewhat lower prices, with the benefit of actual machine tools, and parts you can only (cheaply) buy in lots of 100, and possibly rework kit above the level of a soldering iron and strong nerves.

Which is why, for it to work, that one guy has to set up his own small pro outfit, improve his skills and equipment to the point where he can churn them out fast and sell them relatively cheaply. Or glue diamonds all over the thing and flog it to people with more money than sense.

Suddenly setting up as a business with a view to making a good income looks rather expensive.

Even then, I can think of two big risks which would basically put him out of business more or less immediately:

I would agree with you that it would be difficult to make good money on this as a career move, but he could possibly make a decent amount of extra income (on top of his day job) through doing custom jobs. He would have to charge above the odds to make each individual job it worth his while, but as he would be serving a small niche this wouldn't be unreasonable.

Of course he may be of the attitude that he does not want to take money for this, as it is his hobby and he might not want his hobby to become a chore (even if it is a chore that earns him money).

really? so all those people earning less than that but who are their own boss, doing something they love are just poor chumps? not everyone wants to work a job they pretty much hate so that they can write checks at the end of the month for shit they don't need.

Maybe it could be sold with a couple of Lenovo|Mac stickers to bring to some of those very engaging meetings, presentations, etc...

I wonder why Sony doesn't do this, only packaged better? (Internal politics is usually the answer. Dilbert: "Before we defeat our competitors, we first have to defeat the other departments.") If they stick to legacy consoles, they can probably do a lot of this in emulation, with the emulator code running from a ROM.

Sony could probably boost their share of laptop sales by making their machines capable of playing legacy console games. In addition to bored meeting attendees, there are also game collectors

So, TFA says he has some spare room which he uses to fold up the power cord.According to some sites, the PSU gives 12V and the unit consumes 80 Watts while playing a game.throw in some 20 for the screen, which gives about a 100 Watts @ 12v.put in some overhead for the speakers and you easily get 9 Amps @ 12v.

Would it be possible to run this beast of batteries? I know 9-10 Amps is easily done in RC batteries, but would it be possible to game for say 1 hour on batteries in such a compartment?

He does great work, for sure. But he has been slashdotted more than a couple times; just about every new console he builds and describes leads to a slashdot article, which leads to his webserver being reduced to a smoldering pile of nothingness. He really should stop using his old XT for a webserver. I suspect his portable PS3 would probably handle the load better...

just about every new console he builds and describes leads to a slashdot article, which leads to his webserver being reduced to a smoldering pile of nothingness. He really should stop using his old XT for a webserver. I suspect his portable PS3 would probably handle the load better...

Or Slashdot could just provide links to the Coral cached version [nyud.net], and solve the problem for every submitted site like this.

Will Slashdot ever learn? Why not coralize these links before posting the article? Why not refuse articles which link to toy webservers which don't coralize, or have the editors coralize such links? Oh wait, that would be suspiciously like editing.

More on topic, re: cough-positioning, FTFA: I like to make a grumbly, rumbly noise in the back of my throat like a mostly-contented bear. This makes refreshing visual items wiggle around (only at lower refreshes though! and more on CRTs than LCDs anyway) especiall

There are apparently legal gray areas with that that CmdrTaco doesn't want to get into. If I recall correctly, it's not clear that he has the legal right to take someone else's content, throw it up on some other server that does not earn the original author ad revenue, and post a link to it on the home page.

The point is well-taken, but it would be enough to load the site via coral before slashdotting it (i.e. posting it to the front page) so that coral would have it cached before someone needs to go load it from said cache.

Because 95% of the time he doesn't need anything more than that XT webserver? Because it doesn't make sense to buy the server/bandwidth just for the few occasions when he's slashdotted and has a traffic spike?

Because it doesn't make sense to buy the server/bandwidth just for the few occasions when he's slashdotted and has a traffic spike?

There are ways to accommodate that. If he is using a "professional" hosting company, many of them allow for bandwidth scaling to meet expected changes in demand. If he is running his own webserver, he would be wise to set it up more intelligently to handle the traffic loads.

Of course, if the answer is the latter rather than the former, his poor little webserver should be a useless pile of rubble now; perhaps he will replace it with a more robust system.

The original ("fat") PS3s all included an option for the PS3 hypervisor to host an "OtherOS", like Linux, instead of booting into the GameOS. PS3 Linux was a PPC distro running on the Cell's 2.4GHz PPC CPU core, with access to the bus, 6 of 7 working DSPs and other devices (but not the RSX GPU) through drivers and filesystem mapping APIs. I could run Ubuntu on the PS3, install a driver and use mplayer to watch full HD movies from the hard drive or streaming from a network fileserver. I could program the Cel

A PS3 that fits in your lap but runs only GameOS is not a laptop, except in a trivial sense that we're obviously not talking about here.

Whether or not it runs OtherOS is what makes it (not) a laptop. Linux is the only OtherOS ever installed, and without OtherOS none but GameOS is installed. A PS3 Slim does not run Linux, so it cannot be a laptop.